Sun In The Mouth

And the truth scorches and singes the pink open flesh of your mouth with its pungent yellow taste, so, speaking the truth is not so easy with just one tongue, anyway. Seeing might have been closest to truth and as Plotinus said the eye would not be able to see the sun if it was itself not sun and so seeing was understanding. The Egyptians called the eye with the circle of the iris with the pupil in the centre as the sun in the mouth and that was their truth. Cyclops must have had little to see in this vast world and deprived of the whole truth and that was his loss, his tragedy. Even Argus with all his eyes couldn’t escape in the end. How much truth, how many eyes of how many senses would it take to tell the truth to the lord of the third-eye? A king of a Tamil temple city raged mad to know the truth of the scent of a woman’s hair. Since money bought truth he made ready, a thousand gold coins. And a poor poet still married to faith prayed on to Shiva, the lord of struggling survivors, lord of births and lives and deaths, lord of poor poets who gave him a poem to be sung at the king’s court. A savant there picked a mistake like peeling the scab of a healed wound and said that the poem was wrong. He said that any woman’s hair did not have a natural scent. The lord of dances and grey ash and cremation grounds came down to challenge this stubborn man who extended his truth, even if the woman was the consort of the lord. He would not budge even if the lord threatened to open his third eye, the eye in the forehead which would reduce him to bone-white ashes as light as the wispiest clouds. The court cowered in fright. . . But in arrogance the savant said a mistake is a mistake even if it was the lord of the forehead-eye. O’ saint-bard and master of many wily words What do you know of truth or love, or the scent of a woman’s hair? On the nights of naked sky and a fragile quarter moon, my lord, he of the deep blue throat, he of the rivers in his hair, he of the third-eye, comes to me. Before he tears the blankness of my womb, before he traces the length of my spine, the curve of my thighs, before he strokes my cheeks, he buries his head in the thousand and one nights of my long tresses and he says it smells like the wind-lost voices of his childhood summers.